LUCKY IS LOST
By Marshall Thornton
Smashwords Edition
© 2010 Marshall Thornton
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“Daddy, I can’t find Lucky,” Kayla said, a hiccup of emotion in her voice. “He got out and I can’t find him anywhere — please come!”
At first, I barely registered that the dog had run off. The last time I’d spoken to Kayla had been more than a week before and the conversation was prickly, so I was just glad to hear her voice. She’d asked for an Ollea 3000, a touch screen cell phone that two of her friends now had, to replace the basic flip phone that came with her mother’s plan.
My ex, Deborah, and I discussed it and figured the extra cost to be around fifty dollars a month. Of course, if we got the smart phone for Kayla we’d have to get one for her older brother, Brandon, just to be fair, and the cost would be doubled. I volunteered to add both kids to my plan if I could deduct the hundred dollars from my child support payments. Deborah decided flip phones were just fine and I could be the one to tell Kayla no.
“Why do I have to do it?” I asked.
“Because I tell her no a dozen times a week. This is big. She really wants this. If you tell her no, I’ll do it the next time something big comes up.”
I wanted to argue, but honestly I had to agree. As much as I disliked Deborah most of the time, it wasn’t fair for her to always be the one saying no. I agreed to do it. It was just a phone after all. Kayla would get over it. What I hadn’t expected was how stubborn she could get. I guess there’s a lot you miss when your relationship with your daughter turns into a weekly overnight visit and every other weekend.
“I’m on my way, sweetheart,” I told Kayla, quietly thrilled that she wanted me, and clicked off my phone.
On the drive to Deborah’s, I began to worry about Lucky. She’d been an attempt to save my marriage. Foolish, I know. But just as some couples have a child in a vain attempt to save a relationship, I got a dog. She came from a no-kill shelter where I was told she was a German Shepherd/Pinscher mix and a little over two years old. A medium-sized dog, she mostly looked like a Shepherd though a bit on the brown-side. Her personality was energetic and stubbornly loyal. Moist brown eyes made me feel the dog was a bit depressed, as though she’d seen the world’s problems and couldn’t quite forget them. Deborah hated her on sight, but Kayla and Brandon had already named her Lucky.
I don’t particularly enjoy going to my ex-wife’s house, my old house. It’s in College Park Estates just off Bellflower about a mile and a half from my apartment. Modest for the neighborhood, it has three bedrooms and a nice family room with a wide fireplace. It’s modern with a roof sloping asymmetrically over two thirds of the house and a façade boasting a flagstone wall.
In the backyard, I built a dog run with a special doghouse that echoed the architecture of the house. The fancy doghouse was meant to please Deborah; Lucky didn’t care. I hoped it might help Deborah integrate the dog into our lives. It didn’t. Aside from walks around the neighborhood, Lucky spent much of her time in the backyard. I wanted to take Lucky when we divorced but, somewhat perversely, Deborah insisted that the dog needed to stay with the kids. I insisted they would see Lucky when she was with me, I lost the dog with everything else.
I parked in front and walked up the driveway. I still had my garage door opener on my keychain and clicked open the garage door so I could walk through to the kitchen door. Many women change the locks after a divorce. Deborah preferred I keep a key in the event that the kids needed me. She also preferred I not come in the front door or walk around to the sliding glass door that led from the backyard deck to the dining room. No, she enjoyed my coming in through garage like some kind of deliveryman or household servant.
The garage was wall-to-wall junk and hadn’t stored a car for years. Inside the house was spotless with everything in its place, but the garage was a disaster where Deborah kept things she might need someday. In fact, while we were still married I stopped calling it the garage and started calling it the maybe-some-day room. Deborah hated that.
It was full of busted furniture, baby clothes, rejected exercise equipment, camping supplies, wheel-less bicycles, boxes of out-of-style clothes, fabric remnants, a broken sewing machine, an old red wheelbarrow (pointless since Deborah paid a gardener), and unremarkable grade school projects by each child. I’d built a worktable into the back wall and hung a pegboard above it where my tools were still on display. They stayed where they were for two reasons, one) there was no point in my putting them in a box and keeping them in a closet at my apartment, and two) I couldn’t easily get to them.
Stepping through the kitchen door, I heard the television blaring in the family room and, from deep in the house, the whir of a treadmill coming from the master bedroom. I yelled “Hello.” The house seemed to wake up and footsteps began to move toward me. First to arrive was Kayla. At eleven, she still has the slight, pitched forward belly of a small child. Above her belly though she’d begun to develop “nubs” as she calls them. As in “my nubs are sore.” A statement that always squeezed a bit of discomfort from me — which I’d guess was the reason she said it. Her face was tear-stained and she threw her arms around me.
While I hugged my daughter close, Chuck walked into the room carrying a copy of Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Chuck Hubbert had been seeing Deborah for ten or eleven months. He was in his early thirties, lumpy, with pale skin and receding peach colored hair. A graduate student at the university that was a few blocks away, I’d always assumed that the proximity had something to do with their meeting but had never asked. Since he was no great physical specimen and had limited prospects as a provider, I had to assume that Chuck had near magical skills in the sack. It was the only reason I could imagine Deborah tolerating him for more than a weekend.
Chuck looked up from his book and said, “Hey.”
I smoothed Kayla’s hair, pushing it out of her face. “How long has Lucky been gone?”
“Couple hours,” she said.
“Where was Lucky the last time you saw her?” I asked.
“She was whimpering, so Chuck let her out.”
“No, I didn’t. I mean, I don’t think I did.” Chuck seemed to be searching his memory to see if it might be true. Briefly, I wondered if he was stoned. And if so, did he get stoned around my kids? I sniffed the air for the smell of pot. All I got was lemon furniture polish and the faint odor of a dog in need of a bath.
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “Definitely, I didn’t.”
“Did you see Chuck let her out?” Deborah asked Kayla as she walked into the room.
“No, but that’s the last time I saw her.”
“When you didn’t see Chuck let her out? That’s the last time you saw the dog?” Deborah translated, as she always felt entitled to. Kayla frowned at her mother.
I intervened. “Lucky was whining. Chuck was around. Then you didn’t see her anymore. Is that right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I looked at Deborah over my child’s head. She wore expensive workout clothes; tight fitting yoga pants and a clingy pink tank top. During most of our marriage she’d carried an extra ten pounds, I thought it made her sexy. She hated it and since the divorce had dropped the weight and was now all hard-edged and sinewy.
“So what if Chuck let the dog out?” Deborah asked. “It’s not a capital crime.”
“I really don’t think I let the dog out,” Chuck insisted. “I’m reading Faulkner. I sort of zone out when I read Faulkner. I’m not sure I’d have even noticed the dog crying.”
“Brandon!” Deborah yelled abruptly. The four of us waited for my son to make an appearance. Deborah had to yell for him two more times before he came into the room. When he did, he’d left the television playing in the family room. It seemed even louder in the uncomfortable pause he brought with him.
Brandon had turned fourteen the month before. He had the dewy look of boy morphing into a man. There was fuzz under his nose and muscles seeming to pop out of nowhere. A tall boy, he was all shoulders and knees and already beginning to look down at me. His hair was long and avoided anything that might be called a style. He wore only drab T-shirts with pointlessly optimistic marketing slogans. As much as I’d have liked it, the three mood-altering medications he took and his weekly visits to a shrink would keep Brandon from “just doing it” any time soon.
“Brandon, did you let the dog out?” Deborah asked him. Since he’d started the medication more than a year before, she had the embarrassing habit of raising her voice when she talked to him. She seemed to think she could talk over the drugs’ effects.
Brandon gave her a confused look, as though he wasn’t even sure what a dog was. “No, I didn’t do it. I—”
“At this point, it doesn’t matter who let her out,” I interrupted then asked, “Have you been out looking for her?’
“Not yet,” said Deborah.
“Why not?”
“We waited for you.” I let that go. The more time we wasted, the more difficult it would be to find her. She could have at least sent Chuck out to look.
“I’m sure she’ll come back,” Deborah said casually.
Giving my ex-wife a dirty look, I grabbed Lucky’s leash from a peg by the back door and started out. “Come on, Kayla.”
“Richard, it’s a school night. She shouldn’t be out traipsing around the neighborhood.”
“Her dog’s missing, she’s not going to be able to sleep!”
“Well then I suggest you find her dog.” Deborah threw in an unfriendly smile for good measure.
“I’ll come,” Brandon said, a note of defiance in his voice. But I walked out of the kitchen pretending I hadn’t heard him. As I did, I heard his mother say to him, “It’s okay. Just watch your shows, Brandon.”
In the garage, I quickly grabbed a flashlight off my workbench. I flicked it on to see if the batteries still worked. They did. First, I walked out of the garage and around to a gate in the fence. I slipped through and into the yard. Aiming the flashlight, I followed its beam to the dog run. To create the dog run, I’d fenced in one end of the yard, creating a space that was about ten feet by thirty feet. Over time, Lucky had worn away the grass and the run was now hard-packed dirt with a slight dip in the center. An embarrassing testament to how much time Lucky spent in the run. Actually, I was surprised she was in the house that night at all. It must have been Kayla’s doing. I was well acquainted with her mother’s yelling at her to get the dog out of the house.
I flashed the light into the doghouse just to make sure Lucky wasn’t hiding in there. It seemed empty, as did the rest of the yard. At the very back of the property stood an old, sturdy Chinese Tallow in which I’d built Brandon a tree house for his tenth birthday. It was about fifteen feet off the ground, the entrance now covered in chicken wire and the slats I’d nailed to the tree to form a ladder long removed. I didn’t give the tree house a second glance. I never did. In fact, I did my best not to look at it.
On my way down the driveway, I decided to take the route around the neighborhood Lucky was most familiar with. Or, at least, the route she knew best when I was the one walking her regularly. For the most part, the neighborhood was lovely. Wide streets, private cul-de-sacs, it looked unplanned, spontaneous almost, with each house unique — different architectures but all in styles that appealed to the well-educated, middle-class owners. A long time ago it occurred to me how perfect the neighborhood was at giving people what they want, the impression of individuality wrapped in a layer of conformity. I mentioned that to Deborah once and was told I “think too much. They’re just houses.”
“LUCKY! LUCKY!” I called out over and over, waiting for a bark or yelp in response, not getting any answer except crickets and the traffic over on Bellflower.
Lucky had always been Kayla’s dog. She’d be mortified if we lost Lucky. I’d been trying to make an extra effort with my daughter; she’d gotten shortchanged in the last few years. When Brandon was twelve, Deborah found a half-drunk bottle of vodka in his room. I suggested it was simple experimentation and felt we shouldn’t do more than ground him and keep a closer eye on him. The thing that disappointed me most was that he denied knowing anything about how the vodka got into his room. Selfishly, I suppose, I would have felt better about my parenting skills if he’d told us the truth. Deborah wasn’t happy, but she went along with it. We grounded him for a month and instituted a weekly search of his room. Despite the fact that we never found anything, his behavior became increasingly difficult; he got in trouble at school; his grades went into freefall. He was withdrawn and anti-social.
We were convinced he was drinking, though we couldn’t prove it. We constantly smelled his breath but never found the sickly sweet smell of alcohol. Maybe it was drugs. But we couldn’t find those either. Deborah and I fought about him all the time. Finally, some things happened which couldn’t be ignored and we started with the shrinks. Brandon’s first diagnosis was conduct disorder. He’d since been diagnosed as having ADHD, oppositional defiance disorder and, most recently, plain old depression.
I couldn’t look at my son without feeling an enormous well of guilt.
“LUCKY! LUCKY!” My voice was quickly getting hoarse. I turned onto College Park Drive and headed down to Jennings Park. Lucky loved Jennings Park, though there wasn’t a whole lot to it. It was just a scrap of grass stuck next to a drainage canal. There were bushes at the edge to screen the park from the nearby houses. If Lucky were anywhere she’d be there. She was so trusting, so friendly. You’d never mistake her for one of those genius dogs you see in movies, the one’s who come and tug on your pant leg when the bad guys are coming. No, Lucky was the kind of dog who’d run right up to the bad guy and nuzzle. I wondered if someone had taken a liking to her and decided to ignore Deborah’s phone number etched onto a medallion Lucky wore attached to her collar? Or had some freak decided it would be fun to hurt a dog? Just the thought, gave me a sick feeling in my stomach.
“LUCKY! LUCKY!” The wash next to the park was dry as a bone. It was fall, too early for the winter rains. Lucky could easily have made her way into the canal and then followed it God knows where. I nosed around the park, shining my flashlight under bushes. Nothing. I scanned the park. It was uncomfortably quiet. “LUCKY! LUCKY!”
Circling back to Deborah’s house, I wondered if I should have continued my search farther into the neighborhood. I wasn’t sure how much good it would have done. I’d checked the areas that Lucky was familiar with. It was hard to imagine her going beyond that. But if she had, and she must have, well, she could have gone anywhere.
It had been more than an hour and I’d gotten nowhere. Something told me if I spent another three hours wandering around I still wouldn’t find the dog. I zig-zagged a few more blocks. “LUCKY! LUCKY!” It was pointless, I was sure. Still, I wasn’t ready to go back to Deborah’s house and admit defeat.
I ended up at the foot of her driveway wondering what else I could do to find the dog. I knew I was being stubborn. So many things in my life had spun out of control; finding a dog should be easy, doable, and yet I failed at even that. I decided to take a closer look at the house across the street, which was now little more than a fenced in construction site.
Everyone in the neighborhood called it “the Shilling house” since Barb and Allen Shilling were the last people to live there. It belonged to someone else now, but no one had met them. I heard they were from Orange County and had been planning some kind of McMansion, but then the real-estate market tanked and credit, especially credit for construction, dried up.
For the most part, the original house was gutted to bare studs — part of the roof was still there, the windows and some of the flooring but you could see right through it. A wire fence ringed the property at its edges. I walked the perimeter looking for a gap, or a pulled up bit of fence, someplace where a dog might have gotten in. I didn’t find anything.
Of course, I knew if she was in there she wasn’t okay. She’d have answered my calls. I shined the flashlight on the framework, pointing the light down into the crawl space beneath the house. At first it was nothing but cobwebs. Then I walked toward the back of the property. I ran the light underneath the kitchen flooring.
A set of eyes looked back at me. My heart leapt; the evening wasn’t the disaster I thought it was; I’d found Lucky. Then my eyes focused and I was staring at a white mask, black beady eyes, inky hunched body and a rattail. An opossum. It gave me a toothy hiss and ran further back under the house.
Giving up, I went across the street to Deborah’s. Kayla had been sent to bed. Her brother numbly watched a very adult cable show in the family room. Deborah was cleaning the kitchen, though it looked spotless. She glanced at the spot on the floor where Lucky should have been but wasn’t. It was obvious I hadn’t found the dog. Deborah didn’t mention Lucky. I suppose it was kind of her.
“Can I slip in and say good night to Kayla?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Deborah said. “She has school in the morning. Let’s not excite her anymore than we have to.”
Angry, I shambled into the family room. Brandon was on his flip phone talking to some one in a low voice. I stood there until he looked up at me. “Did you find Lucky?” he asked.
“No. I’ll look some more tomorrow.”
He nodded like that would take care of something and went back to his call. I felt like he had more confidence in me than I deserved.
I worked my way back through the house. Before I got out the door, Chuck snagged me and said, “I’ve been having trouble getting my laptop to log onto Deborah’s network. Do you think you could help me with that?”